Globalization and FilmFrom METROPOLIS to MEGALOPOLIS and the RISE of the PRECARIAT2017-12-14T02:17:25Zhttp://tzaniello.wordpress.com/feed/atom/WordPress.comtzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/?p=2002015-01-24T18:35:00Z2015-01-24T18:35:00Z]]>Every generation, it seems, must revisit the fields where migrant labor tolls to keep fresh strawberries and tomatoes on our tables. Edward R. Murrow is usually credited with the first expose of the “forgotten people,” as Murrow referred to them in his legendary television documentary in 1960, The Harvest of Shame. Murrow begins with footage of the almost exclusively black field workers boarding trucks to take them to the tomato fields in Immokalee, Florida. He quotes one farm owner: “We used to own our slaves. Now we just rent them.”

In our generation this same task falls to director Sanjay Rawal whose 2014 documentary Food Chains begins, like Murrow, in Immokalee, following workers almost exclusively Latino on the busses to take them to the tomato fields, arriving for shape-up at 8 AM and returning home usually about 8 PM, having earned only $42. One of the workers says: “we live like animals in cramped houses,” often packing fifteen to sixteen people in a trailer during picking season.

But Rawal has a new topic besides the grim recitation of facts and expression of outrage characteristic of Murrow. The workers have formed the Coalition of Immokalee Workers (CIW) who struggle on a number of fronts to double the income of the tomato pickers by asking the big three consumers—fast food restaurant, food services, and supermarkets to simply double the single penny earned for every tomato picked. This will have the effect, of course, of doubling the wages of the workers.

The film traces informational leafleting, marches, pickets, and even a major hunger strike as the strategic efforts of the CIW to move public opinion and embarrass the big three food consumers. In the end only company, the food chain Publix, refuses to support what came to be called the agreement called the Fair Food Program. Publix, the largest food chain and actually one of the richest corporations in any business, of course refuses to comment on camera.

Rawal’s film uses historical footage with great skill and effect. As I have mentioned, he uses some of the shots from The Harvest of Shame, but he also includes telling footage from Ethel and Bobby Kennedy’s visits to Cesar Chavez’s own hunger strike in 1968. Rawal films Ethel Kennedy and Robert Kennedy Junior as they visit the hunger strike of the CIW in 2013.

By my count Murrow’s film engendered at least three major broadcast TV specials on migrant workers within ten years of his CBS Reports film. But it took another thirty years when three more documentaries re-visited Murrow’s films and reported disappointedly , as in New Harvest, Old Shame (Frontline, 1990) “little has changed” for the now Latino migrant workers who travel from Florida to New Jersey for their picking opportunities.

So Rawal might not have the last word on the trials and tribulations of the migrant workers he films so respectfully, but it is at the very least a compelling and convincing word at this point, fifty-five years after his documentary mentor, Edward R. Murrow, filmed the migrant workers in the same town.

]]>0tzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/?p=1952015-01-24T18:30:06Z2015-01-24T18:18:01Z]]>Working people, their unions, labor issues in general, and political movements involving the working class have always been a part of Hollywood, independent, and foreign filmmaking. These films dramatize or document working people, labor activism, labor history, and related economic, political, and sociological issues.

The films have, however, resisted genre analysis because, first of all, they cross genre boundaries and, secondly, independent filmmakers have produced many labor documentaries that do lend themselves to genre study. Many of them, however, generated some distinctive film cycles. Here I want to focus on two cycles, one of the 1960s, the other 1990s, all of the films focusing on migrant labor.

The film that launched a film cycle of three major 1960s television documentaries about the hidden plight of migrant workers in the 1960s was one of the most influential investigative journalistic exposes of all time–Edward R. Murrow’s Harvest of Shame (1960). Murrow covered virtually every issue of importance to the mainly white migrant workers, although he even included the then relatively little-known bracero program, whereby the growers could import Mexican workers (who remained Mexican citizens) and pay them even less than the pitiful wages they were paying American workers.

Harvest of Shame is in part famous because it was not typical of TV reporting in a conformist era. Murrow was unusually forthright on political issues. Murrow’s juxtaposition of cattle trucks with strict safety rules and mistreated migrant laborers in rickety trucks is a famous example of his no-holds-barred style.

The TV documentaries that followed Murrow’s lead also use a strong voice-over narrator by a star or celebrity reporter (who may even be in the shots) and were always on the edge of muck-raking rather than simple reporting. By the end of the decade, however, exploited labor knew no color:

What Harvest for the Reaper? (1968), shown on NET [National Educational Television] Journal, focuses on just one of Murrow’s targets, a labor camp in Cutchogue, Long Island, that “would make slave life on the old Dixie plantation appear attractive” (Variety).

Hunger in America (1968), shown on CBS Reports, sent Charles Kuralt and others to focus on poverty among Mexican-Americans, Navajos, southern blacks, and white Virginia tenant farmers, the latter occupying the estates of Senator Everett Dirksen and the popular TV entertainer Arthur Godfrey.

Migrant (1970), shown on NBC, sent Chet Huntley out in the field to document how Coca-Cola and its subsidiaries (Snowcrop, Hi C, Minute Maid, and Tropicana) exploit Florida farm workers; Variety noted that the show’s sponsor, Coca-Cola, tried to “kill the exposé,” which was shown, in the end, without a single commercial.

A second film cycle was also generated by Murrow’s Harvest of Shame, even if thirty years had passed. In fact one of them, Hector Galan’s New Harvest, Old Shame (Frontline, 1990), demonstrates that “little has changed” for the now Latino migrant workers who travel from Florida to New Jersey for their picking opportunities.

Five years later, Dan Rather’s Legacy of Shame emphasized that laws were finally in place to protect migrant workers but “now the problem isn’t the laws, it’s their enforcement.” Rather chronicles both the highs—the Farm Labor Organizing Committee (FLOC) and the lows—crew leaders and owners virtually treating their workers like indentured servants.

The subject of Children of the Harvest (1998), a NBC Dateline film, is obvious—gross violations of the law in regards to child labor, although the filmmaker has some sympathy for the families who feel they must send their children out to work in order for all of them to survive. The film ends with one farmer, disciplined by Heinz for using child labor, predicting that when children are kept out of the fields, Heinz will go out of the pickle business.

Although certain films from these three cycles have substantial reputations, most of the other films are not well-known and are sometimes seen as one-off or maverick productions. Keeping such films isolated from the cycles they are developed in obscures important relationships that have escaped film historians on occasion.

P.S. The last three documentaries, New Harvest Old Shame, Legacy of Shame, and Children of the Harvest, all have extensive discussions in my book, Working Stiffs, Union Maids, Reds and Riffraff: An Expanded Guide to Films about Labor (Cornell University Press).

]]>1tzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/?p=1932015-01-07T18:06:00Z2015-01-07T18:06:00Z]]>Although perhaps no more brutal than the numerous films about the murders of “illegal aliens” slipping across the Mexican border to the USA or Mexican women kidnapped off the streets of Tijuana, I Witness (directed by Rowdy Herrington) has an even more generous range of corrupt and duped individuals than these other films.

The setting is an American-owned maquiladora undergoing a unionization drive. The company certainly doesn’t want the union, the local bent cops don’t want the union, and even American officials and middlemen don’t want the union, but at least for them it’s because it will cause too much trouble and maybe not even help the workers in the end.

Into this thicket of thieves and connivers strides James Rhodes, a human rights observer played by Jeff Bridges, who has been demoted because he duked a reporter complaining about the poor food at a Sudanese hotel during a famine.

Two sets of murders remain unsolved during this union struggle: two American boys shot while dirt-biking just across the border in Mexico and an entire village of compesinos—men, women, and children—found slaughtered in a collapsed tunnel. Viewers suspect how the two sets of murders are related almost before the protagonists but suffice it to say that the villagers were recruited to clean up a midnight spill of deadly methyl dioxide at the maquiladora, whose poisonous effects on them make them dangerous witnesses to the company’s reputation.

Jeff Bridges’ character does have some allies—an unbent cop who is nonetheless suspicious of gringo do-gooders, a local saintly priest, and an American bureaucrat Bridges would have had a romance with if this weren’t such a depressing film.

One wants not to be depressed in the end despite the number of deaths of innocent people including our heroes and the arrest of a really bent cop, but the web of shifting allegiances among the tough guys in this community, including even a mythical drug lord who is supposedly responsible for all bad things happening but who doesn’t really exist, makes the film’s coda especially difficult to take.

Nonetheless in the cinema of globalization this film should occupy a special but difficult place. The workers at the factory as well as the villagers epitomize the global labor force we now call the precariat, using the term popularized by British economist and writer Guy Standing, made up of temp workers seasonal workers, service industry workers, day laborers, immigrant and migrant workers, convict labor, the unorganized, the unemployed, the undocumented, etc.

That this labor force is global and threatened in even First World countries is the subject of what may be the only current play specifically named for the phenomenon—Chris Dunkley’s The Precariat (2013), performed in London. Macdonald workers as well the neighborhood drug sales force are all at risk in this drama of a dysfunctional working-class family that can only make ends meet by selling drugs or stealing.

]]>0tzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/2009/06/05/tienanmen-anniversary-the-tank-man-2/2009-07-17T15:54:48Z2009-06-05T22:12:19Z]]>Although it was first shown three years ago, the single-best introduction and analysis of the Tienanmen events of 1989 remains Frontline’s “Tank Man.” This is my entry on the film from THE CINEMA OF GLOBALIZATION:

The Tank Man

Frontline makes an extraordinary claim in its documentary about “the tank man,” the Beijing man who stepped out in front of the Red Army’s tanks as they rolled in to Tienanmen Square in 1989 to crush the New Democracy movement that was sweeping the nation and whose photograph (and video footage of his courageous and foolhardy act) became an inspiration for many people to resist oppression in other countries. He disappeared after his moment of fame, but because he symbolized the resistance to state control, Frontline argues that in effect the entrenched Chinese leadership made an implicit deal with its own people: we will give you economic freedom but not political freedom. That is: there will be a Starbucks on the corner but you cannot use the Internet without censorship.

Frontline demonstrates how, in just seventeen years, this strange pact with the devil seems to have come true. China’s economy is booming, people in Beijing now have incomes and consumer goods that were dreams in 1989, and capitalism at the top is thriving. At the bottom millions of rural folk have been displaced, desperate for jobs in the new industrial economy, and treated like second class citizens. Many Beijingers nevertheless remember how their fellow citizens were murdered by the Red Army the day before Tank Man made his move. Some wonder if the cost of globalization for China’s economy has been too high.

Of course footage of such an event today would be routine and even captured by cell phones and web and pod cast around the world in seconds. In 1989 capturing this moment before widespread digitalization was lucky: one Western photographer hid his roll of film in his hotel toilet bowl tank because he knew the security people had spotted him photographing Tank Man from his balcony. (This is the most often reproduced Associated Press photo by Jeff Widener at en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tiananmen_Square_protests_of_1989.) Live footage of Tank Man moving about to block the tank and even climbing aboard to converse with the driver is compelling viewing. To my eye the people rushing to lead him away were sympathetic fellow protestors, not security men, but others think he was arrested and murdered.

One man and one tank carry a big message for Frontline but their evidence of a globalized China launched in part because of political oppression is nonetheless convincing. In one sense the students and others who demonstrated for continued economic reforms and political liberalization ended up with half of the loaf but at a very great cost.

Resources:

Martel, Ned. “Mystery of One Man’s Act of Defiance on One Day in Beijing.” New York Times, 11 April 2006. Although the reviewer is also captivated by the mystery of Tank Man’s disappearance, he finds some of the documentary “rambling” and over-ambitious in its scope: the film “reintroduces a frustratingly faceless enigma and teases a viewer with the hope of a resolution that never arrives.”

Wong, Jan. Red China Blues. New York: Doubleday, 1996. Memoir, subtitled “My Long March from Mao to Now,” by a Canadian of Chinese origin, who went from a pure red Maoist during the Cultural Revolution to a horrified participant in the Tiananmen Square events.

Zhang Liang, Andrew J. Nathan, and Perry Link, ed. The Tiananmen Papers, The Chinese Leadership’s Decision to Use Force Against their Own People—In their Own Words. New York: Public Affairs Press, 2001. Volume documents how both hardliners and reformers at the top levels of the Chinese Communist Party debated the fate of the student protests on the New Democracy movement; in the end it is economic reformer Den Xiaopeng who gets the credit for approving the military attack on the square.

]]>1tzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/2009/04/06/state-of-play/2009-04-06T17:00:20Z2009-04-06T17:00:20Z]]>The “New York Times” announced on April 6, 2009, that a new two-hour feature film, a re-make of the six-episdoe BBC serial by the same title will soon be released. And although it will star Helen Mirren, the Queen of British Sophisticated Serials, I thought it helpful to post my entry on the original series (as it appeared in “The Cinema of Globalization):

Combining investigative journalism with a political fix by an oil company makes “State of Play” exciting viewing, with an added bonus of an attractive newsroom team and a crusty chief editor. The mysterious deaths with which the series begins–a young woman working for a British MP goes under a Tube train and a young black man is gunned down on the street in broad daylight–establish an anxious rhythm that each episode sustains.
It also provides a counterpoint between very emotional and scary sequences with sardonic and occasionally sick humor. It turns out that the MP was on the very Tube train that killed the young woman (did she fall? was she pushed?) and that he was having an affair with her. Anyone who has ever been in a crowded subway car stopped for “unforeseen circumstances,” according to the conductor over the p.a. system, will get guilty pleasure from this sequence because the conductor cannot resist gossiping: “Well, there’s a body on the line at Green Park.” And the passengers (including the MP) groan.
The MP in question, Stephen Collins (played by David Morrissey) is heading up a parliamentary Energy Select Committee in the midst of an inquiry into the oil industry; when he hears of his assistant’s death, he breaks down in public and begins a roller-coaster ride that ends his marriage and puts his old campaign manager, Cal McCaffrey (played by John Simm), now an investigative reporter for the independently minded major newspaper, on the case. It will come as no surprise to viewers of political thrillers not to mention readers of the news that a fix must be in.
This political thriller is not only a mystery–the two deaths in the first few minutes of the first episode are obviously related–but a condemnation of the ways of secret government business-as-usual and like “A Very British Coup” (q.v.), which it resembles in many ways, the primary enemy is the upper-crust establishment types that dominate the government regardless of the political stripe of the party in power. In this film it is New Labour, mocked by Cal at one point for its Millennium Dome fiasco (see “MM”), while in “A Very British Coup,” the Tories don’t like being upstaged by the old Labour Party especially with a union leader as prime minister.
The politics of oil and brilliant newsroom performances by a cast, especially Cal’s workmate Della Smith (played by Kelly Macdonald) and boss Cameron Foster (Bill Nighy), make this a must-see; globalization may have found its genre after all–the petro-thriller (see “Syriana”).

Resource:
Goodman, Tim. “Two Reasons You Shouldn’t Watch Sopranos on Sunday Nights.” “San Francisco Chronicle,” 16 April 2004. Says that the film “gives credence to the idea that there may not be any better format for telling an impact story than over the course of four to six hours.”

]]>1tzaniellohttps://tzaniello.wordpress.com/http://tzaniello.wordpress.com/?p=322009-04-05T11:50:06Z2008-12-02T02:14:31Z]]>1. Condensation: Five Video Works

Chen is a former still photographer and installation artist who turned to filming performance art in these five pieces that are really mock documentaries: he stages non-actors in industrial and similar landscapes in Taiwan and creates abbreviated and almost frustratingly interrupted narratives about important social, economic, and political issues. He chronicles in effect the end of the industrial metropolis and the creation of the faceless megalopolis.

“Factory” is an ambitious interpretation of the end of industrial labor. Chen recruited former workers from an immense but abandoned textile factory and staged re-enactments of their work and artful variations of same. In one shot they are seated at their sewing machines as if the disappearance of their work over the last seven years had not happened. In a related shot they are face down on their sewing machine tables all covered with the same blanket as if they were taking naps or passing over collectively to some unknown dreamland.

The women workers were of course the victims of globalization: although low-wage Taiwan was the center of the global textile industry form the 1960s through the 1990s, other countries, especially China and other East Asian neighbors, undercut Taiwan’s production costs and the work migrated. For the film the workers first located then handled for the camera the paraphernalia of their old workstations left behind when the factory closed, but with some surprise they also picked up their old loudspeakers and posters they had created to protest the plant’s closing.

The most recent film, “The Route,” documents world-wide port workers’ union protests and demonstrations held in solidarity for fellow port workers; ironically none of these demos took place in Taiwan, but Chen nonetheless has Taiwanese laborers acting out the other demos.

Two other films also document abandoned labor centers: “On Going” cuts between a worker at a new office building and an abandoned factory, while “Bade Area” follows squatters at still another abandoned factory in the town of Bade. All of these factories have a stark, minimalist beauty to them, a beauty that in the hands of a different artist (the late Robert Smithson, for example, photographer of abandoned industrial cities of Northern New Jersey, among his other accomplishments) does not always reach the pitch of protest that seems inherent in Chen’s work.

The fifth is the only non-industrial piece,–“Lingchi—Echoes of a Historical Photograph”–about a famous 1904 photograph of the execution of a man under the torture known as “death by a thousand cuts.” The scene is eerily re-staged by Chen (himself the “victim”) as a tribute to what he calls his resistance of the “state of amnesia” in the Taiwanese “fast forgetting” culture. In this sequence, reminiscent of the exquisite torture of actress Maria Falconetti in Carl Theodor Dreyer’s “Passion of Joan of Arc” (1928), Chen moves the end of the history of metropolis into the cinematic zone of eternal image-making.

Smith, Roberta. “Figures Moving as if in a Trance Across an Isolated, Lawless Island.” “New York Times,” 25 July 2007. Chen “makes his country feel like a lawless place suffused with corruption, paralysis and isolation” when he tries to make art of Taiwan’s history “without paralyzing the viewer.”

In this black and white music video Kanye West was one of the first rap artists to expose the world of blood diamonds; it begins with the text of his words: “Little is known of Sierra Leone and how it connects with the diamonds we own.” He inspired the the rappers’ mission for the film “Bling: A Planet Rock” mission to Sierra Leone to investigate abuses in the diamond industry.

The video opens in black and white documentary fashion in an underground (non-diamond?) mine where we see adults panning baskets and children wielding pickaxes. “We are the children of blood diamonds,” sings West, just before we cut to a diamond appraiser.

We follow West through what looks like a Middle European cityscape just before the camera cuts to a young white couple: he’s on his knees putting a diamond ring on her hand that begins to run blood with blood. West drives his DeLoreran through the streets until he is joined by the child miners in their loincloths. He crashes his car into a jewelry store, escaping with the children down the street: “Please purchase conflict-free diamonds” flashes across the screen after a remarkable montage of a statue of Christ with a sword, West playing two pianos at the church altar, and the children rushing down the center aisle.

West uses the lyrics from the title song (by Shirley Bassey) of the James Bond film, “Diamonds are Forever,” as an ironic counterpoint to the images of the child laborers.

3. Bordertown

Director: Gregory Nava
Screenplay: Gregory Nava

Border culture throughout the world has more than its share of fascinating cinematic explorations. Director Gregory Nava (whose films include “Selena,” his first collaboration with a very young Jennifer Lopez) offers in “Bordertown” a remarkably daring, disturbing, and to a certain extent plausible story of the murders of (mostly) women workers from the maquiladoras that fuel the pre- and post-NAFTA economics of Mexico and the United States. Official estimates of the murdered and missing, mostly young, women are ridiculously low, as the police try to act as if they are not incompetent or paid off, even coming up at one point (in real life as well as the film) with a suspect, an Arab national, who they say killed them all. An unlikely story, as the toll reaches, by many estimates, more than 400.

Nava’s film is not simplistic politically, although the image of a lawless Mexican society has been standard cinematic fare for generations. Nonetheless, the factories create wealth for their American corporations—in this film, a TV and monitor manufacturer—and graft for the border rough boys; they also require round the clock shifts for the young women, most of whom has been forced from their rural homes because of poverty, crop failures, and forced buyouts of their families’ land.

The film offers one way in which so many youngsters could be kidnapped, raped, murdered, and disappeared: the buses that take the girls from the factories and dump them on the streets of Juarez often in the middle of the night. In a bar, strip club, and generally sleazoid culture, the film makes one bus driver the invisible kidnapper.

Nava packs it in: Jennifer Lopez plays an aspiring Mexican-American reporter for a Chicago newspaper, herself the child of migrant workers who were murdered (for organizing in the fields?). She had started in the business with Antonio Banderas who now runs a crusading newspaper and who is reluctant to help his old girlfriend out when she befriends an Indian worker who literally crawls out of the sandy grave her attackers bury her in. While we would expect the beautiful people (Lopez and Banderas) to get together again, she actually sleeps with a maquiladora director and dandy mainly to get information about one of the possible killers.

A convoluted plot to be sure, but a chillingly beautiful film about the edge cities that are a law unto themselves. The greenish tint over the massive maquiladora factory floor (where announcements like “Lines 1 and 3 are falling behind their quota. Accelerate production” are common) illuminates the streams of workers as the shifts change, while the fire that ravages the young woman’s favela is an inevitable punishment for one of her tormentors who she believes (literally) is the devil.

For Nava corporate greed, unfair NAFTA legislation, and cowardly American editors add up to one of the most disturbing whitewashes of our era. The film ends with one more body found, clothed in her blue factory smock.

The geeky but jaunty know-it-all-ness of Thomas L. Friedman’s books (such as The World is Flat) comes through in this personal exploration of “geo-green alternatives” to the demon oil of our era. Although Friedman is not as bad as some–buying oil at all = terrorism–Friedman still waves the red flag of Islamo-terorism in our faces a little too often: “Petro-dollars,” Friedman states, “are now funding networks of Islamic militants.” Is that true?!

Nonetheless this is a short but very helpful march through the alternatives, in every instance a minor or major success story. Gas guzzlers like Hummers and even a new Ford pickup truck that looks aluminum-light, are the enemies because of their incredibly bad gas mileage (10 and 12 MPG, respectively). On the heroes’ list, auto-wise for the moment, are such cars as the Prius and the prototype of a car run by a hydrogen fuel cell. Which, of course, has no MPG because it doesn’t use oil. What it also does not have is an infrastructure of corner “gas” stations pumping hydrogen.

Friedman is bullish on hybrid cars, hydrogen as fuel, ethanol, and solar and wind power. In every instance he makes a good case and gamely does the equivalent of taking the alternative power source for a spin around the block. He even takes on the scientifically-supported economics of ethanol (that it takes more energy to produce ethanol than it saves) by instead bundling up some switch grass (“five or six foot high prairie grass”) for ethanol production because it has “more energy in it than corn.”

While any screen time given to Gary Bauer, President of American Values, an advocacy “think tank,” is too much, it may be helpful to hear occasionally what a right-winger contributes to the oil debate. “There are evil people,” Bauer intones, “feverishly working on ways to kill us. We are dependent on our energy resources to people that worship death and have drawn a bulls eye on our backs.”

The only thing scarier than peak oil, in my opinion, is the rhetoric of Gary Bauer that has me supporting Osama bin Laden every time I tank up. If only it were that simple.

Mink, Eric. “Drunk on Oil, and a Bad Hangover Looms.” New York Times, 24 June 2006. Finds the program a bit “sloppy” and inconsistent at times, but overall it offers its “principal themes” that only “the most rigid of ideologues” would contest; reviewer misses an effectives critique of corn as the only source of ethanol.

Los Angeles is the largest container port in the USA, exemplifying the enormous spread of the megalopolis along the channel.

The episodes are literally all over the place: in one (CSI on the Water), Port Police investigate the alleged rape of a mentally-retarded 21 year. When their crack investigator discovers childish drawings of the woman and her assailant together they conclude they don’t have a case. In another (Missing Man) longshoremen strut their stuff by offloading 4,000 containers from a single ship that had some wobbly engine problems.

The numbers racked up by the Port of Los Angeles are impressive: it has 43 miles of waterfront, 270 berths, and 76 cranes. Twenty-five of its cargo terminals can hold autos, clothing, toys, sporting goods, and electronic products, whose top suppliers in 2007 are, not surprisingly, China (with $119.9 billion) and Japan (with $40.4 billion). Its trade value in Californioa alone is $89.2 billion with an estimated impact on over a million jobs.

Two of the series stars have remarkably different jobs: Mike Rubino, the pilot captain who has to park the 90,000 ton vessels, and Geraldine Katz executive director of the port, who has to combat the fact that the port is “one of the dirtiest sources of contaminated air, carbon emissions anywhere in the region.” (according to the mayor, Antonio Villaraigosa.

In the meantime the series’ producers would do well to watch some science fiction films, since the adjoining Port of Long Beach was disrupted by an anthrax hoax during the filming.

Hale, Mike. “At the Port, Peril is Around Every Corner.” New York Times, 5 April 2008. Although the reviewer knows the jobs at the port of Los Angeles could be dangerous, it bothers him that nothing really scary happens in the season, unlike its sister production of Deadliest Catch (see Cinema of Globalization): he even blames the audience, “living the most comfortable lives this earth has ever afforded to nonroyalty” for a tendency to “festishize danger and risk.”

Metisse (literally, a mixed race woman), the original title of this comedy, was perhaps more accurate and nasty but less metaphoric and cute: Lola (played by Julie Mauduech) is a creamy brown Parisian from Martinique with two lovers, Felix (played by the director, Mathieu Kassovitz), from a working-class Jewish family, and Jamal (played by Hubert Kounde), the black Muslim son of an African diplomat. Like her forerunner Nola Darling in Spike Lee’s “She’s Gotta Have It” (1986), Lola doesn’t like making up her mind but unlike Lola she’s pregnant.

Although the film is filled with anti-black and anti-semitic slurs and jokes, it treats the racial and religious divide in a relatively carefree manner, eventually reconciling the brawling men and transforming competing fathers into domestic pets attending Lola. Although we eventually learn who is the biological father, we never see the baby when she arrives. “What color is the baby?” Felix asks a nurse, who laughs and says that the baby is pink with green stars.

We leave the new happy and unconventional family as a voiceover from racist right-winger politician Le Pen curses at the “bastardized, impoverished race” his fellow citizens are creating.

See Other Films:

La Haine
Crimson Rivers

Further Reading:

Maslin, Janet. “Café Au Lait: Interracial Romance, Leavened by Humor.” New York Times, 19 Aug. 1994. Kassovitz’s film debut “imagines a world where laughter is a formidable weapon, beating out bigotry every time.”

The violence, both physical and spiritual, against Malika, or Noémie, her street name (played by Rachida Brakni) the Algerian woman in this film, is hard to watch; the explicit condemnation of Algerian men both at home and in France is somewhat compensated by the piggishness of the French men we also meet in the film’s other plot motor, that of petit-bourgeoise Helene (played by Catherine Frot).

In order to rescue her sister from the clutches of her father and his oppressive patriarchal culture, Noemie, formerly hooker non grata at home, showers her family with gifts: “With one shitty motorbike,” she tells her sister, “their honor melts along with their religion.”

The film closes with four women sitting on the shore of a lake, having escaped the creepy men in their lives: the eldest, Helene’s mother-in-law, not surprisingly turns out to be the moral center of the film, protecting women and celebrating difference.

As one of the only industrialized countries in the world that has not ratified the Basel Convention on shipping hazardous waste to the Third World, the United States now exports 50 million computers, TVs, and cell phones to the Chinese “e-waste epicenter,” Guiyu, a leading importer of one million tons of e-waste a year.It has surpassed its former rival, Taiwan, that is still attempting to treat its pollution years after the industry that once employed 60, 000 people was stopped by environmental regulations. At one point filmmaker Zhao pans the banks of the infamous Ernjen River in Taiwan, whose banks are still lined with discarded circuit boards.

Guiyu in Guangdong Province, like most of China, has lax pollution controls. Intheir haste to extract gold from the circuit boards and sell to sell other recycled components, local entrepreneurs employ thousands of workers who routinely absorb mercury, cadmium, and brominated flame retardants as they dismantle and burn the discarded electronic devices. This e-waste has conveniently filled up the shipping containers that had disgorged their millions of tons of imported Chinese retail goods in the USA.

Zhao points out that Guiyu had been a “trash town for decades,” but the air is now choked with “burned plastics and baked circuitry,” as the residents pursue what only could be called a cottage industry of e-waste, with homes filled with electronic components. Zhao himself could sometimes spend only a couple of minutes at the workers’ side, so irritating were the fumes; the workers themselves got used to ten to twelve hours of day.

If I had know that Cyclo, both the name and job (pedicab driver) of the film’s lead character, would end up with two live animals (lizard and goldfish) in his mouth, I might have passed on this fascinating and disturbing–occasionally surrealistic–vision of contemporary Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City). I would have then missed the even more graphic violence and kinky sexuality provided by this second feature from the Academy Award nominated director of “The Scent of Green Papayas.”

With these R-rated warnings in mind, what would we gain from this film? Some insight into the crowded Asian metropolis and its pre-auto stage, certainly an understanding of the infiltration of simple working-class jobs by criminal syndicates (however small in scale), and a study (as Jonathan Rosenbaum of “The Chicago Reader” has written) of the “endless cycle of male misery passed from one generation to the next.”

The “male misery” is obvious enough: in the backstory Cyclo’s father (also a pedicab operator) was run over by a truck, but now Cyclo’s new boss (aka The Madam) loses both a son and a devoted lackey (aka the Poet). But this is only half the story, as the film takes somewhat for granted some extraordinary human trafficking that only gets punished when the Poet discovers that Cyclo’s Sister has been raped by a client.

If the metaphor at work in this film is that the underclass is open for exploitation by rampant entrepreneurial underground capitalism because that’s how the Asian metropolis handles the transition from socialism to red capitalism, then perhaps this accomplished director should watch some “Godfather” epics instead of (only) Italian neorealist films like “The Bicycle Thief,” which he parodies early on in the film when Cyclo has his pedicab stolen